David Thayer

Here’s the problem. After umpteen posts that fall into the unsolicited category, a catchall without cachet, there have been three crime fiction posts. Three. No wonder I’m in trouble with the Underwriting Committee, the Steering Committee, and the Mini-Soviet. This blog is a random walk through the delta of low hanging flora we call publishing. One more bite of the apple? Well, my performance appraisal is in, ready for my initials. Toes are tapping with impatiens( flora.) The lady in accounting thinks I’m the one who demagnetized her lifesize Eiffel Tower thingy on the side of her computer. I wouldn’t know how to go about it. Sure, I still have Garfield flashbacks with those yellow feet in the rear window, but I’ve trained myself to just look away.

More coverage of the crime fiction beat. I gave myself a D minus in this category. Must improve. Best of intentions gone awry. I blame Dexter. Not Pete, the Florida guy, the character in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Breakout book from Doubleday, editor same as Dan Brown’s. I didn’t like the book.

Peter Abraham’s Oblivion is more to my liking. I haven’t quite finished it, but I have every confidence that it will end as it began. I may review over at Collected Miscellany this Friday.

Let’s be honest. It’s not the heat. If it were the heat, we could leave the kitchen or have the buck stop here, grab life by the love handles and never let go. In dallying with links, I came across Agent 007’s gripping post about how things in publishing really work. With blacklisted agents, short attention spans, mass confusion, career worries, quotas, quotients, 007 dishes the unvarnished truth about submitting stuff to editors. Readers are strongly cautioned: this gets ugly.

Insider knowledge. We thought the moon was made of cream cheese until Neil Armstrong went up there and checked it out. Big spoiler. Maybe it was blue cheese. The consolation was the knowledge that anyone could visit the moon and jump high in the air. And real estate is cheap. Some rocks are resting in the Smithsonian, proof positive of Neil’s no cheese hypothesis.

I think most unpublished writers, the serious ones, not the dilletantes, already know what a waking nightmare this business can be. Entire web sites are devoted to rejection, and a couple of editors at TOR have devoted a lot of time to the thesis that rejection, while painful, is abundantly deserved. They’re very frustrated that those of us who are stuck with this avocation persist in annoying them with submissions. Now 007 comes along to tell us that rejection is tainted by non-reads. I didn’t read this, but I don’t like it. I don’t like your agent. Telephone pitches confuse me. I have a blacklist.

This is silly. It’s nice that 007 wants to share with the rest of us, but she is not one of us. Since the basis of her post is predicated on the notion that bad things happen to good submissions, what difference do the reasons cited make? None. So, is 007 offering information that is of any use to us? What she is doing is reminding us how dumb and naive we are, how agents suffer on behalf of writers. Maybe 007 has forgotten that writers have more at stake than a commission, a bad lunch, or a rejection based on a non-read. As Richard Curtis pointed out this is not a meritocracy. Books are bought for all sorts of reasons, some good, some not so good. A trip to the bookstore will confirm his point.

Let go of this stuff, my friends. Do your work, find an agent, or don’t find an agent, send it in and stop reading all this crap about blacklists, lunches that go horribly wrong, evil assistants, and non-reads.
You need skill and luck unless you’re famous. That’s all there is to it.

If you’re a novelist who works without an outline, there’s no need to panic. Your approach to the process is an organic one. Don’t take my word for it. Stacey D’Erasmo used the phrase during a book signing a few years ago. I was in the audience experiencing a moment of liberation. No outline…the entire first draft is a narrative outline. The trick is to understand that about yourself. One of the better aspects of writing a novel this way is you don’t know how it’s going to turn out any more than a reader who might one day pick it up in a bookstore.

The approach is a little nerve wracking. Most people who give advice to writers see the outline as vital to the completion of the task at hand. It really isn’t because at the end of the first round the outliner and the organic arrive at the same place, a complete first draft. That’s where the fun starts anyway. The pitfall of an outline is that it can become a crutch, a punchlist that once complete only addresses the series of events the author dreamed up in advance. No surprises.

If you have a completed novel in your desk drawer, or sock drawer, go back and figure out how it started. If it was written from an outline, hey, you’re an outliner. No outline? No need to hang your head. Don’t let them push you around or write fake outlines to appease your inner engineer. Remember the outlined first draft is no better than yours; just make everyone a redhead the first time through, then fade to blonde, brunette, whatever. That’s organic.

Hello. This is the Forty Third Earl. I want to assure you that Watership Down is a real place, not a figment of the imagination. Yes, there are a lot of rabbits. They create quite a nuisance. lovable as they are. The local pub has been taken over by a Norman fellow who makes a decent rabbit stew. Of course, being foreign, he goes too far with the herbs and spices. What’s wrong with a little celery?

I was reluctant to get involved with a ‘weblog.’ After our chief writer’s essay about the cake song, one of my personal favorites by the way, the committee urged me to ‘post.’ I suppose he imagines that people are amused by iconclastic outbursts. This is a literary blog. Marlow, Milton, Dante, Goethe, Jane Austen. That is what we believe the audience is waiting for. Consensus. Is that now a dirty word?

Plenty of excitement here in the west country. Conservative MP Virginia Bottomley is scheduled to address our book club at the Royal Crescent in Bath. Her topic is Decency is Not a Four Letter Word. Hopefully this year’s event will not see a repeat of last year’s fiasco. You may recall that Naked People invaded the venue, and the Right Honorable Lady had to be evacuated by Royal Marines. Rest assured that a considerable police presence is in the offing. Also, the weather is cooperating with a cold front advancing from the Irish Sea. Too brisk for frolicking au naturel!

I am hard at work on my major essay, The Frivolity of French Thought in Literature. A surfeit of material has slowed my progress. Thank you so very much for your consideration.

I know I mentioned this a few days ago, alluded to it in passing, dropped the name. No, I’m not talking about Brett Easton Ellis. Yeah, he’s an interesting writer. So is Charo and she’s making a comeback. I was talking about the late Richard Harris and his cake song, to wit: someone left the cake out in the rain. First of all it was back in the Sixties or Seventies when the cake song was released out of the blue. Between Led Zeppelin albums, there came the cake song. Between footage of the fall of Saigon came detergent commercials. Someone left the joint chiefs of staff out in the rain.

It took so long to bake it. This was a warbly crescendo line as though the writer banged the gong just moments before Dick Nixon threw two fingers in the air on the steps of Marine One. I’m leaving town. That’s what two fingers meant. In another context, out of context, well, a fella might have gotten his nose broken throwing those fingers in the air. You needed to be boarding an impressive looking aircraft to get away with that. No one does it now, and that’s too bad. Hippies have vanished too.

Back to the song. You want just grab the guy by the lapels and demand a timeline. How long? What was the cake doing outside? This was before the Weather Channel, so no one could predict rain. It came out of nowhere, and women everywhere rushed outside to bring their cakes into the house. Hippies were all like ‘hey mom, where you going?’ and mom’s all like ‘cake…outside…rain.’ Actually that sentence structure had not yet found currency. Adlai Stevenson was never all like anything, lived over eighty years, never was all like anything at all. He liked music though and enjoyed cake.

I’ll never find that recipe again. It’s a lost recipe song. Charo could cover it. Maybe the Stones when they had Ronnie Wood. So, it’s an organizational thing, but suggestive of something more sinister, something permanent. It was poetry of the times. Rod McKuen was popular. Some of the Beats had washed ashore in North Beach, a scant few miles from Stanyon Street. Italian coffee was gaining a following. There were Barry Manilow sightings here and there, but Patti Smith was doing Schaefer in the Park. I remember that concert…outdoors, Central Park, big pieces of cake in Bethesda Fountain, yeah, it’s beginning to make sense now that I think about it.

A nice dichotomy in the Sunday NYT Book review section. Blowing ashore on the literary front is Brett Easton Ellis who has written a novel about Brett Easton Ellis, his drugs, fame, celebs he rubs elbows with. In this novel, he’s married and living in the suburbs, apologizes for American Psycho, and writes a story that sounds like the liner notes from Hotel California. He’s friends with Jay McInerny, author of Bright Lights, Big City. The theme is dissolution without much in the way of overarching cause of said dissolution. No Spanish Civil War, Vietnam Conflict, Sands of Iwo Jima to propel young authors into the rich poignancy of loss.

Marilyn Stasio has discovered crime in translation and works from small presses, admiring what she refers to as ‘reformative zeal’, perhaps an obscure reference to Oliver Cromwell. She cites works from Bitter Lemon Press, Serpent’s Tail, and SoHo Crime. The tone is a bit over the top. Stasio pinches every cheek in sight. Small presses are just so cute that you want to hug them to death and leave lipstick stains on their inventive little foreheads.

The showstopper is Carmen Posadas’ The Last Resort, which I’m fairly certain was an Eagles’ album, or, at least, an Eagles song. When not catching for the Yankees, Posadas is Spain’s answer to JD Robb, whose villain wears knee high nylon socks. You’ve met guys like this. They twirl the ends of luxurious mustaches while plotting evil deeds, one of the ‘baroque flourishes’ alluded to by Stasio. The glam photo of Posadas suggests we’re in that murky territory between ‘crime fiction’ and ‘romantic suspense.’ The socks are suggestive of satire, offering a scintilla of cross-genre breakout novel in translation. A reference to Truman Capote sent a shiver down my spine. Baroque, indeed.

Getting some feedback from agents on my current manuscript. One was very kind, another distraught. Third was one of those postcards…wish you were here. Michael Blowhard wrote, noting my apparent disgust with all things related to books. It’s a love-hate thing, Michael. I love books, writing, writers, but love is not blind. Writing queries is one of the chores required of anyone who wants to have a book published. It becomes a state of mind, one that requires some attention to the psyche. Anyway it was a shock to realize that your correspondent has fallen prey to negative thinking, anticipating the worse, like a cohort in turtle formation, blind as a bat. I’ve started work on a new novel, interpreting that as a good thing.

There was a spider in the bathtub this morning, not one of the itsy-bitsy guys of song, but a big one. I looked at him, he looked at me with beady eyes that said, “bring it on.” Okay. On the nightstand are plenty of weapons, books, something spiders are genetically incapable of being threatened by. “He’s got a book. Big deal.”

Grabbed a Mark Bellingham. No, that’s a library book. How about Denise Mina’s Field of Blood? Rather apt, no? Let’s find an American author. Check the tub, maybe the spider hopped a Greyhound. No, he’s there. I don’t want Diane to come along and see this bruiser basking on the porcelain. I picked up the paperback edition of Bel Canto after a brief interlude with The Historian. That would be overkill. Now I’m reading the blurbs…focus!

Yeah, I used Bel Canto, one of the finest novels of the past several years, to send Mr. Big Stuff down the drain. Sorry, Anne. As a parting thought, try killing a spider with an e-book.

Trusty Edward Wyatt has another article in the NYT about the publishing buisness. Last time he talked to Jane friedman, CEO of Harper-Collins about branding. This time Wyatt has a story about large format paperbacks for Baby Boomers, tracing their reading from youth On the Road through the glorious Clancy years ( let’s break this down again: how many t-72s in a Soviet armored division? We’re not leaving until the intermodal ramifications emerge). Finally, today’s Boomers have mastered child proof caps, are approaching their golden years and want a book to read. But, criminy, who can read this tiny print?

Cut to scene from Old Guy CSI: “We have it under the microscope, Sir. It appears to be a book.”

Okay, the typical Boomer couple have settled in for the night. Frank doesn’t bowl anymore (lower back pain, low scores), he can’t play golf at night, the Mets are playing the Dodgers on mute, Cynthia is reading Madame Bovary. Frank prowls the house, adjusting his elastic waistband ( yes, Tod Goldberg, it’s Sansabelt. Just you wait, young fellow.) After barking his shin on the damned bookcase, Frank grabs one of his wife’s paperbacks. He’s never heard of JD Robb, but there’s a pink submarine on the cover…Operation Pettycoat?

Frank is unconscious on Page Nine. The Mets score a run in the bottom of the Tenth, but who can read ESPN’s tiny ticker on the bottom of the screen? Cynthia is mildly puzzled that Frank is reading JD Robb, but relieved no popcorn was spilled when the book slipped from Frank’s splayed fingers. “Where’s the submarine?” he asks in a muffled tone. “That’s a cactus,” she says.

They’re both wrong, but who could afford another prescription, the embarassment of an eye exam administered by a junior high school student in a lab coat?

Tess Gerritsen emailed to say she’s slightly depressed over the dustup with Lee Goldberg. I’d read her blog entry where she pondered giving it up ( blogging.) Where does that punctuation go? Actually her blog is very well written and I’m going to ask my hostess, Booksquare, to link to Tess’ blog. That should cheer her up.

After all the guff I’ve given Hollywood lately, Raelynn Hillhouse’s trip to LA has me wondering what I would do if Mel or JeLo called. Well, first I’d delete all my snarky posts about the film industry, locate a few quarts of Rogaine and a soupcon of Just For Men, and suck in my gut. Or just go with the middle aged guy thing, although I can’t think of any middle aged people in LA who resemble middled aged people elsewhere. I imagine my stance as tough guy critic would swiftly dissolve into blubbering fool with Mel on the blower. “I love your movies, Mr. Gibson, especially the one with Tina Turner. All of them, really, even the flick with Helen Hunt. I didn’t think it was dull and repetitive…did I? Hell, no.”

You’re thinking…sell out. Come on, it was a cute movie. I’m going to go rent it, just in case. How fast does Rogaine work? Is it like Roundup? That fast?

Raelynn Hillhouse is interviewed by this reporter over at Collected Miscellany. Link on over for the full transcript. Meanwhile, the mass market paperback of The Rift Zone is available. Good book, good writer. She has even more exciting news, to wit, she’s in LA for meetings with Jennifer Lopez’ production company and Mel Gibson’s.